This invention relates to a process for converting solid waste and/or sewage sludge into a chemical intermediate substrate, solid carbon products and other energy sources, and/or separate recyclable by-products.
Nationally, approximately 200 million raw tons of municipal solid waste and approximately 25 million bone dry tons of sewage sludge are generated yearly. Due to chemical contamination, the traditional methods of waste disposal and handling have proven to be technologically unsuited to safe disposal of human and municipal wastes.
Cost-effective and marketable utilization of the intrinsic values of municipal or industrial solid waste components requires that there be both flexibility and reliability in the end use to which derived products may be put.
Efforts to develop a commercially-viable resource recovery market from solid wastes and sewage have been hampered by problems of putrefaction and high levels of impurities in the recovered by-products.
The key to economic recovery of resources is therefore the processing of the input municipal solid waste, sewage sludge and/or industrial solid wastes into clean, uniform non-toxic components: glass, ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals, and a substantially clean, near-homogeneous chemical intermediate substrate from which marketable by-products may be produced in a cost effective manner.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide an efficient, inexpensive process for separately or simultaneously converting solid waste and/or sewage sludge into useful energy sources or non-energy related by-products.
An object of this invention is to provide a modular system which is flexible enough to economically handle large or small quantities of waste.
It is another object of this invention to produce a chemical intermediate substrate, wherein the chemical intermediate substrate is defined as a liquor which may or may not be partially dewatered and which consists of organic solids of a near-homogeneous size distribution and relatively high purity (by resource recovery standards).
It is another object of this invention to provide a process in which separate, non-energy related by-products such as metals and glass of marketable cleanliness standards are easily separated from the chemical intermediate substrate.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a process and means whereby the chemical component distribution of the chemical intermediate substrate can be analyzed and adjusted to any consistent chemical energy content desired.
It is another object of this invention to provide a process for destructive distillation of partially dewatered chemical intermediate substrate for production of a clean-burning, storable, high-BTU solid carbon fuel product.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a process for direct combustion of partially dewatered chemical intermediate substrate for the production of steam for process applications and/or conversion to electricity.
It is yet another object of this invention to produce methane gas in a landfill by combination of partially dewatered chemical intermediate substrate and microbial innovative buffers.
It is yet another object of this invention to produce soil conditioners, animal feedstocks, fertilizers, or building board from chemical intermediate substrate.
A still further object of the present invention is to produce virtually no unusable residues, thereby eliminating the need for landfill sites.